1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to the management of technologies within and between organizations. More particularly, the invention relates to a method and system for managing technologies that supports both local and enterprise level requirements.
2. Background Art
In today's increasingly technological environment, many companies are beginning to appreciate the importance of innovation. It is also relatively well accepted that in order for innovation to truly flourish, collaboration among individuals is critical. While collaboration groups are not new to the industry, the global economy has recently led to a “fragmentation” of the typical company (or organizational structure) leading to difficulties in the collaboration process. For example, the sharing of thoughts and ideas has transitioned from face-to-face interaction to remote interaction. Thus, an individual having the appropriate technological background to participate in a particular collaboration group is often no longer located on even the same continent as the other individuals in the collaboration group.
It is well documented that another important factor to the successful development of new technologies is the market. For example, customer requirements and other market-driven parameters have typically determined whether or not a given technology is ultimately successful. These market-driven parameters, however, have traditionally been conceptually divorced from the above-discussed collaboration considerations. It is therefore desirable to provide a system and method for dealing with issues such as global competition, the place of change, the introduction and adaptation of technologies, the need to drive the cost and cycle time for development down, the need to improve internal and external communication processes, and the need to stimulate innovation.
While a number of organizations have attempted to address these issues, certain difficulties remain. For example, one approach has been entitled the “Engineering Book of Knowledge” (EBOK). The EBOK is a living document database that allows teams, termed “tech clubs”, to document and keep up-to-date on such topics as lessons learned, preferred practices, research into emerging technologies, job functions and benchmarking results. The tech clubs are cross-platform groups having a common interest—such as wiper, dimensional control, or sealing in the automotive context—which meet to share problems, create solutions, and share lessons learned. The direction of the EBOK approach is to primarily support the tech clubs in performing their work. A moderator/facilitator introduces new and modified content based on the results of facilitative sessions. The scope is therefore to provide support to individual tech clubs as they manage their own information and solve technical problems within their domain. The technical approach has generally been to use Lotus Notes commercially available from IBM. The EBOK approach therefore serves only local and function-specific needs. This type of local and function-specific solution does not adequately support enterprise needs for sharing information and participating in connection processes.
It is also important to point out that the above approach requires all of the users of the system to deal with the same collaboration tool (namely, Lotus Notes), whether that tool fits the needs of the particular user or not. In fact, it is quite common for various collaboration groups within an enterprise to have drastically different local requirements. Imagine, for example, the individuals in a tool shop being forced to use the same collaboration tool as the individuals in the accounting department. This problem is especially apparent when existing tools have already proven to be effective. It is this “single tier” approach that reduces flexibility and often results in rejection of the overall system.
Another approach seeks to satisfy two types of knowledge sharing requirements. The first is the creation of a knowledge repository, e.g., a bookshelf type system. The other is an information delivery system, called a “cockpit” system, that gives push notification to support manufacturing operations. The direction of this approach is to support operations awareness and production problem solving. It is important to note that this direction is quite different from the direction of product improvement and innovation support. The scope of this conventional approach is assembly, test and manufacturing systems operational information and business scenario planning. Applications are provided for information capture, management, and distribution. Within this scope, the governing principle is to “copy exactly” (or replicate) data so that all people view a consistent, reliable set of information. This approach uses Documentum (an off-the-shelf document management system) to centrally manage the target documents and information. Commercially available SEMIO® software is used to support taxonomy building and management, viewing and information delivery. These technologies are used within a Microsoft 2000® software environment for supporting communication and coordination services. It is important to note that this approach uses a “cybrarian” to serve as a focal point for supporting the publishing process out of the local group.
It should be noted that the distribution of responsibility can be viewed as a spectrum ranging from the “librarian” approach to the “steward” approach. At the librarian end of the spectrum, a single individual is responsible for maintaining and providing access to all of the information shared between the individuals in the enterprise group. Thus, the librarian approach represents a minimum distribution of responsibilities. At the steward end of the spectrum, each individual is responsible for maintaining and providing access to the information corresponding to that individual. Thus, the steward approach represents a maximum distribution of responsibilities.
While the cybrarian approach (between librarian and steward on the spectrum) provides a centralized decision-making mechanism, it is often desirable to provide a more localized approach. For example, under the cybrarian approach, each individual does not have the ability to define collaboration parameters for the piece of information being shared. It is therefore desirable to provide a system and method that provides a maximum amount of flexibility while maintaining security at the collaboration level.
It is also important to note that the above approach suffers from the same single tier problems as the EBOK approach. Thus, this system requires the many distributed individuals to interact with a tool unrelated to their local business processes and environment.